of occupation, 312 for violating curfew.81 Of these, 249 were convicted, receiving an average of five days’ imprisonment or equivalent fine, though most were tried toward the end of the second week and received no consideration for their prior detention.82 MG in the American Zone would later officially authorize protective custody, but in the earliest stages of the occupation, MGOs regularly employed this sort of informal detention without charge in pursuit of social control.83
MGOs’ use of mass arrests and protective detention extended from their tendency to view the MG Legal Code as a tool for enforcing order subject to changing local demands. The law could become a cudgel against offenders appearing to resist Allied authority. The first case in Nuremberg involved a fifty-three-year-old man charged with illegal possession of a firearm and “concealment of records.”84 He was acquitted on the first count but convicted on the second and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. The second case was against a young man charged with “interfering with [Allied] communications,” an offense that warranted an additional charge under Section 43 for “acting to the prejudice of the good order.” He was fined 400 RM, which resulted in four hundred days’ imprisonment when he could not pay, rather than the standard of forty days (10 RM per day) recommended by JAG in February 1945 and already widely used at the time.85
Hiding one’s prior Nazi affiliations was the most common form of resistance and in the early weeks of the occupation often resulted in harsh sentences. Two men in Oldenburg received five years’ imprisonment. But MGOs could easily construe virtually any offense as resistance, and harsh punishments were also meted out for otherwise nonserious offenses. The first trial held in Augsburg was for a young man charged with possession of stolen Allied property, tried in a hastily convened intermediate court. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. The next five trials in the intermediate court occurred over a month later, four for the ostensibly more serious charge of firearm possession and one for hiding a Nazi history. The punishments for weapons were between five and thirty-seven years in prison. But in an indication of how flexible sentencing was, hiding a Nazi past only resulted in a 1,000 RM fine, or one hundred days.86
SHAEF was aware that detachments deviated widely in their application of the MG Legal Code. At the beginning of March 1945, JAG released a list of recommended sentences for nearly all offenses in the MG and the German Criminal Codes. MGOs paid little, if any, attention to it, or to the principle of equal justice that underlay the recommendations.87 The same notional offense could receive a sentence of anything between a small fine and life imprisonment or death. Moreover, practical concerns often mitigated punishments. Fines were handed down when jails were unavailable, which then changed after a few months when they were reconstructed.88
Variations in sentencing stemmed in part from MGOs’ arbitrary use of the law. A problem of charge clarity pervades the military court records. Officers applied widely varying charges to the same criminal behavior, obscuring early criminal conditions. MGOs in many cases failed to record any reason for applying one of the catchall laws (Sections 21 and 43). Wilhelm Dietz (aged forty-four) was charged under Section 43 in the Frankfurt Summary Court on 10 April 1945 and received a punishment of six months in prison, but the record offers no further explanation of his actual crime or reason for the lengthy sentence.89 On the same day, three other people were prosecuted and convicted for curfew violation and received 100 RM fines, so Dietz’s crime was likely comparatively serious, but as with many files that remain, we have little way of knowing.90 MGOs’ use of the law to assert Allied power further exacerbates the problem of charge clarity. It is possible that Dietz ran afoul of the regime in some noncriminal way that led to harsh punishment. For many MGOs, enforcing order meant ensuring that Germans were duly deferential. Even the mildest infractions could attract harsh punishments if the perpetrator was disrespectful, often recorded as “Disrespect of Allied Forces” next to a charge under Section 21 or 43. The British in Cologne most consistently detailed the underlying offense, such as shouting insults, making indiscreet drunken comments, or refusing to obey orders. Punishments again varied wildly. “Disobey police” often meant 180 days in prison, while “drunk” could mean anything from 2 to 30 days. “Attempt to mislead Allied forces” resulted in eighteen months.91 In Darmstadt and Augsburg, punishments for similar offenses against Allied authority ranged from five days to one year of imprisonment.92
MGOs’ concern for fairness ran a distant to second to demonstrating power. In one of the first cases in Nuremberg, twenty-one people were charged with violating curfew despite claiming that German civilian time was one hour behind American military time. All were found guilty and received 100 RM fines or ten days’ imprisonment. The following case involved forty-one curfew violators who also claimed the clocks were wrong. Of these, thirty-two were found guilty, despite the MGO’s then noting that a change in German time had occurred and “all arrests were made within 45 minutes after 2000 hours,” meaning the defendants had believed they were adhering to the law.93
MG detachments’ independence continued into the postwar occupation. Consequently, the variations that arose from ceding such power and discretion to local commands also remained. MGOs continued to respond to conditions in their areas as they saw fit, with little to no regard for the actions of other detachments, even as the American occupation transitioned from an overtly combat operation to one of reconstruction and social rehabilitation. Ensuring the peace remained MG’s and MG detachments’ primary objective through much of the next three years. But as we shall see, through the summer of 1945, that objective consistently overrode transformational aims.
PART II
Destruction, Disorder, Fear, and Fantasy: The Direct Military Occupation of Germany, 1945–1946
4 Order and Disorder
The first two weeks for MG Detachment H4 B3 in rural district Kulmbach were bookended by major train disasters. The first occurred on 1 June 1945, the day the officers arrived in the bucolic, sparsely populated country area in northeastern Bavaria. The district had fallen to American forces nearly seven weeks earlier without a shot fired, and it was unscathed by war, at least physically. The area comprised some thirty villages and communities that centered on the small Kulmbach township, set in a valley on a slow-moving river overlooked by the sixteenth-century castle Plassenburg. But the idyllic setting masked profound problems, and that first day was hardly peaceful for the new MGOs. The previous American occupying unit had known their tenure was temporary and had done little more than keep the peace. Many of the villages still had Nazi mayors and administrators, in clear violation of denazification orders, and the new MGOs were concerned about resistance. An MG court had not been established; the backlog of cases meant people were languishing in district jails. There were severe shortages of vital resources including coal, rye, and penicillin. And then, as the new MGOs tried to make sense of the situation, two trains collided, injuring thirty-five Russian DPs, five seriously, and overwhelming the local hospital.1
The new MGOs worked diligently over the next two weeks to restore administrative order, but they were for all intents and purposes alone. A summary court was established to try the backlogged cases, and village mayors were ordered to tally stocks of coal and other supplies. Some of the overt Nazis that remained in government were replaced with popular members of the local communities. Refugees moved through the district virtually every day, straining limited resources and local security. But acquiring supplies was the most pressing issue, and conferences were arranged with neighboring detachments to exchange sugar for rye and grain for penicillin.2 Coal, which was vital to nearly every aspect of local infrastructure from health care to food processing, proved impossible to source.3 On 11 June, after numerous failed attempts to barter for more with other American detachments, detachment officers took a train 175 kilometers north to Altenburg in the Soviet
